Friday, February 29, 2008

For those of you unfortunate non-knitters who are reading this, or knitters who must have been living in a cave for the past 6 months and don’t know about it already, Ravelry is “an online knitting and crocheting community.”If you want to be a part of this new time-suck … um…I mean…online tool for organizing your knitting and connecting to other knitters world wide,you have to get on a waiting list and wait for your invitation.It took about a week for my invite to come.

So now, I’m on.I’m able to visit other knitters’ online “notebooks” all of the world.I can see what yarns they have in their stash.I can view their finished projects, their projects in progress and the stuff that they are dreaming about making.I can also share all this info about my own knitting with the rest of the world.All us Ravelry folks can read each other’s blogs, we can chat, we can form groups, we can join knit-alongs.We can do a shit load of other things that I don’t know about because….I have dial up internet.

There’s really very little that I would change about life in Maberga…hot water on demand would be nice, maybe not having a breeze blowing through the bedroom or rain falling in the studio…but even these things pale in comparison to HIGH SPEED INTERNET!!!!

Life in the 21st century, no matter where you live seems to require high speed internet, if you use the internet at all, that is.Using photo organizers, like Flicker….difficult.Using a knitting organizer, like Ravelry….frustrating. Try maintaining a website…forget it. Even blogging, I must tell you friends, takes aaaaaaalooooonnnnnnnggggggtttttiiiiiiimmmmmmeeeee.

But, well, a big part of the reason I moved here was to slow down.Ask and ye shall receive.

Screw that.I want speed, HIGH SPEED.I’ll continue to wait for hot water – I don’t care.If I run out of time for a shower, I won’t take one.I’ll wait for the bedroom to warm up as I light a fire, that’s what down comforters are for.I’ll drive slowly in my tiny motored car - if I’m late for work, so be it. I’ll wear a different outfit if I’m waiting for the sun to dry my clothes. But when I want to see a new sweater pattern, friends, I want it now.

This is what I’ve been doing in that lag between hitting ENTER and getting the page I want

Monday, February 18, 2008

We’re having another cold spell here in Maberga. Ok, not -30 F kind of cold, more like +35 F kind of cold.But when it gets as cold as it gets where ever you are, it’s really cold.(That was my layman’s version of the Theory of Relativity).

Yesterday in order to brace myself against the bitter cold(a relative term that my relatives would clearly dispute) that I knew was waiting for me outside, I put on David’s down parka, fur lined boots (mine, not David’s), gloves, a scarf and pulled the hood of my sweatshirt up over my head.As I was walking up the road with the dogs, feeling the cold and noticing my outfit, I remembered being in the Bahamas during a hurricane.

In the days leading up to the actual eye, the winds started blowing, and the sun wasn’t it’s normal 110 F self, it was maybe in the upper 90’s.As David and I walked back from the beach in our swimming suits we passed all of the Haitian population of the island sporting turtlenecks, boot and parkas.Cold is relative.

Since yesterday was Sunday and so damn cold, I decided it was a good day to finish up all the knitting that was lying around the house in baskets – knitting that seems liked such fun when I first started, items that I really needed to have, projects that I cast on and cruised on until…well, I stopped.So yesterday, dressed like a Haitian immigrant in the Bahamas before a hurricane, I finished this stuff.

Now I’m ready for spring.

PSI just wikipedia-ed the theory of relativity…I might have missed the basic principle in my layman’s version.

Wednesday, February 13, 2008

It’s a beautiful February day in Maberga.I’m sitting on one our top terraces of land.This way, while I type I can also throw the lemon down the mountain for the dogs to retrieve.It’s a great deal for me and for the dogs.

(Obviously that photo is from my archives and not one taken at the moment I'm typing this. I just kind of thought a post without a photo is a little like Garfunkel without Simon)

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how much I miss blogging regularly. I’ve really got a lot of positive feed back in the past couple of years from people who enjoy reading my ramblings.And that’s nice, but I must admit that I get as much, if not more out of doing it than you all do.Yeah, ok, it’s a nice way to keep family and friends up to date about what’s breaking in my old house (and maybe a knitted project or two).But for me, it’s more than that.It’s kind of like keeping a little diary of cartoons about where I am and what I’m doing.It’s a way to look, quite literally on a computer screen, at the absurdity and beauty of life.For me it’s a way to step back, gain a little perspective.Mostly, to laugh at myself.

I don’t really know where I’m going with this post. Maybe I just wanted to record this great morning that I’m having sitting in the February sun.Not so much for the record itself but for the process of being able to step back, and look at where I am and what I’m doing.

Maybe I’m also trying to apologize for my lack of attention to my blog.I don’t read many other people’s blogs but I do know that it is really disappointing to go to that link everyday and see the same stale old post for days (or weeks!) at a time.I will say there is a direct inverse correlation between the number of hours I put in on my day job and the number of posts that get written.Bloody day jobs.

Ok, enough of all of that….

David and I are looking for a new car.New to us, of course.We’ve already lost out on 3.We came very close to buying a BMW.Any of you who know David and me will find that hysterical.Ok, so it was 18 years old but it was still a BMW.I admit that I really wanted to buy it so I could write a really funny blog post about it.We didn’t buy it because it would have cost more to register it because of it’s engine size than we were paying for it.It seems that we just can’t afford the power that a BMW supplies.At this point I could wax metaphorical about money, speed, power, their relationship with quality of life, happiness, etc. but let’s just laugh at the thought of my driving an 18 year old BMW up the road to Maberga.

We are now on attempt number 4.Photos to follow if it really happens.It’s a Fiat 500.*Slightly less powerful than the BMW.